LEGO Math Games

Today we have a guest post from my husband, who loves to create games playing with math, science, and chess for our sons. He surprised me with a guest post highlighting one of his favorite math games, wasn’t that sweet?

Starting a math lesson over breakfast can be a tricky ordeal. The kids are not yet in the mood to study or to answer questions. So this morning we came up with a variety of games to stimulate their analytic thinking.

Key ingredients:

1. Bag of small uniform objects – we use black beans or small legos
2. Melissa & Doug Numbers 1-10 Write-A-Mat
We played three different games, each with increasing level of difficulty focusing on basic math skills.

Game #1 – counting

The simplest of the tasks – I asked my five year old to place in each grid the right number of legos. This was a fun activity to get him used to the game, and to introduce the math side into the discussion. As he began to lay out the beans, he decided to make sure to place each one on top of each animal / object. That was his touch.

Game #2 – even / odd numbers

With the Legos carefully laid out on the mat, now I introduced a new concept – odd and even numbers. I asked him to see if he can find one friend for every Lego in the square. A Lego can only have one best friend, so each friendship can only include two Legos. If everyone in the square finds a friend, then the number is even, if not, it’s odd. Our son had a great time doing this exercise and later ran up to the mom to tell her all about Odd and not Odd numbers.

Game #3 – split up the numbers

In this variation of the game, I asked my son to figure out the split of each number using the beans. The split would include one pair of beans (2) and the remainder. For example,

we split up number 4 into 2 and 2.

number five into 2 and 3

number 6 into 2 and 4, etc.

By the time we got to 8 and 9, he started to get tired, so we wait to do those numbers the next time. In the meantime, we spent a few more minutes playing with the Legos, and, of course, clean up!

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Lovely idea #2. My son is a bit older but even at 7, when they are just learning about even and odd numbers, I think this is a good activity to hone the skill. Thank you for sharing – also inviting you to pass by our parenting page on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ConsciousParentingApproach for parenting tips and tidbits, motivational/inspirational/fun quotes and photos – see you there!!